Click on any of the images for the full-sized picture.

07-Apr-2001 -- While on a business trip to Carlsbad, New Mexico I could not pass the opportunity to visit 32N 104W. The confluence is on the New Mexico - Texas border about 33 Miles South (on US 285) of Carlsbad.

At the border, I turn on County Road CO726 east to 32N 104W. The confluence is only 50 ft or so south of CO726 on a flat sandy area. It is 1.3 miles west of the Pecos River. I constructed a rock cairn for future confluence hunters.

The area is typical Northern Chihuahuan Desert with Creasotebush, mesquite, yucca and an occasional cactus. The landscape is low rolling hills and the confluence is lower than the hills to the west which blocks the view of Guadalupe Mountains

What I find interesting is the unique geologic history. It’s difficult to imagine that 250 millions years ago the area was the western edge of the supercontinent of Pangaea, and was near the equator. During this time a vast tropical sea, the Delaware Sea, full of various forms of life, covered portions of Texas and New Mexico. Over millions of years, calcareous sponges and algae combined with other lime-secreting marine organisms and vast quantities of lime that precipitated directly from the seawater to form the 400-mile-long, horseshoe-shaped Capitan Reef. Eventually the sea evaporated, the reef subsided, and a thick blanket of sediments and mineral salts buried the reef. The reef was entombed for millions of years until a mountain-building uplift in this region exposed a part of the fossil reef in the Guadalupe Mountains. http://www.nps.gov/gumo/gumo/geology.html. The immediate area sank and formed the Delaware
Basin.